Documenting China’s Borderlands Podcast – Episode 2: A Hundred Years of CCP Borderlands Policies

Borderlands

Documenting China’s Borderlands Podcast – Episode 2: A Hundred Years of CCP Borderlands Policies

Benno Weiner, Robert Barnett, and James Leibold

September 25, 2025

The Chinese Communist Party’s borderlands policies fluctuated over time since its founding, alternating between periods of gradual integration and forced assimilation. Regardless of the methods used, the Party’s goal has remained the same: to meld all these regions and their people into a coherent national whole.

This second episode of the Borderlands Podcast Miniseries examines how the notions of Borderlands, of nation-building, and of ethnic policies have been intimately intertwined throughout the hundred years of CCP existence. With contributions from Professor Benno Weiner (Carnegie Mellon University), Professor Robert Barnett (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London and Lau China Institute, King’s College), and Professor James Leibold (La Trobe University).

Materials cited or referenced in the recording

Benno Weiner, The Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020).

Andrew Martin Fisher, The Disempowered Development of Tibet in China: A Study in the Economics of Marginalization (Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2014).

Fei Xiaotong 中华民族多元一体格局 [The Chinese Nation’s Diversity to Unity Model] (Beijing: Central University for Nationalities Press, 1989).

Ernest Renan, “What is a Nation?” (speech delivered at the Sorbonne University, Paris, on March 11, 1882).

Glossary of Chinese terms used in the recording

Minzu 民族 nation, nationality(ies), ethnic group(s)

Shaoshu minzu 少数民族 ethnic minorities

Minzu tuanjie 民族团结 ethnic/national unity

Minzu gongzuo 民族工作 ethnic policy work / nation building work

Duoyuanyiti 多元一体 diversity within unity / plurality and unity / multiple origins, one body / from diversity towards unity

Zhonghua minzu 中华民族 Chinese nation

Zhulao 铸牢 to forge

Zhuhun 铸魂 to cast souls

Zhonghua minzu gongtongti yishi 中华民族共同体意识 collective consciousness of the Chinese nation / a strong sense of community for the Chinese nation

Transcript

(Nadège Rolland)

Why are China’s borderlands so crucially important to the Chinese political leadership? In our previous episode, we traveled back in time to understand how the regions surrounding China proper were brought into the Qing empire’s fold and then included at the turn of the 20th century into a vision for multi-ethnic nation defined by Sun Yat-sen (the founder of the Nationalist Party and leader of Republican China), as “Five Races under One Unified Nation.”

At the same time as the Chinese Nationalist leaders were drawing a new mental map for their country, another political movement was emerging, with its own revolutionary ideas about nation-building. The Communist Party of China, founded in 1921 by 12 delegates representing a total of 50 members, would, in less than three decades defeat the Nationalist Party, seize power, establish the People’s Republic in 1949, and preside over the country’s destiny for the next seventy plus years.

The CCP’s vision for China’s borderlands fluctuated over time, alternating between periods of gradual integration and forced assimilation. And yet, with the exception of only a few years in its early incarnation, the party’s goal remained the same: the transformation of these regions and their people so that they would be melded into a coherent whole befitting the party’s ideal —even as the party’s ideal also evolved over time: the Maoist period endeavored to foster a new, classless, socialist society through revolutionary transformation; in contrast, Deng Xiaoping and his successors strove to build a “moderately prosperous society” that would enjoy the benefits of economic development while continuing to accept the one-party rule system. And since he came to power in late 2012, Xi Jinping has attempted to forge a stable, controlled society where the party-state manages all aspects of life.

I’m Nadège Rolland, Distinguished Fellow for China Studies at the National Bureau of Asian Research, and in this episode, with the help of some of the best experts and scholars in the world, I invite you to take a deep dive into a hundred years of CCP policies towards China’s borderlands. The notions of borderlands, of nation-building, and of ethnic policies are intimately intertwined. This is true not just from a geopolitical point of view, but also more prosaically because of the ambiguous meaning of a concept that is key to our discussion today, and will be used often by the scholars who have joined this episode: the concept of mínzú 民族. Minzu refers both to “nation” and to “ethnic group” or groups.

During its formative years in the early 1920s, the Chinese Communist Party was heavily influenced by agents of the Comintern, an organization created by the Soviet Union to spread world communism which provided material support and ideological guidance to Chinese revolutionaries. Following the Comintern, the CCP began to frame the borderlands question in class struggle terms, aiming to solve the relationship between oppressor and exploited. The Party eventually determined that the main issue to be tackled in the borderlands was not the conflict between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, but the longstanding subordination of non-Han people by the Han Chinese majority resulting from Han chauvinism, an extreme form of Chinese nationalism that promotes the superiority of Han Chinese people over ethnic minorities. For a short while, the Party also left opened the possibility of national self-determination for non-Han people in those regions. I asked Benno Weiner, a historian of modern China at Carnegie Mellon University focusing on ethnopolitics and author of the book, The Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier, to describe how CCP cadres thought about the borderlands in the early 1920s.

(Benno Weiner)

The simple answer is that they didn’t think all that much about the borderlands or non-Han peoples in the early periods, with very few exceptions.

(Nadège Rolland)

During that period, the Party was mostly in survival mode. It had started as an urban-based revolutionary underground party, who then joined the fight against Chinese warlords alongside the Nationalist troops, and then fought against the Nationalists as a rural guerrilla movement in the mountains of Southern and Central China—very far away from the country’s borderlands.

(Benno Weiner)

So of course, they were fighting for their lives anyways, didn’t have a lot of time to be too concerned with this. To the point that they did engage with the question of borderlands and non-Han areas, they mostly aped the Soviets in the early period. And they did have a concept and this is the first time the concept of a minority nationality in Chinese, shaoshu minzu 少数民族, comes into the parlance is through the United front and the Soviet influence. So they, they borrowed this terminology from the Soviets, obviously translating it into Chinese. But early on, they actually acknowledged that non-Han peoples were not naturally going to be part of some sort of future Chinese state. And as early, or as late maybe, as in the 1931 state constitution, they overtly gave, explicitly gave non-Han people the right of self-determination, including secession, again, borrowing from the Soviet model. But of course, up to that point, it wasn’t an issue. This was not something that was at front and center for them.

And that changes very dramatically on the Long March, in 1934-1935, when various Red Army units found themselves marching through very, for them, remote and foreign areas in northern and western Yunnan and western Sichuan, southern Qinghai, Gansu provinces, and coming into contact with people that we now or they would later codify as Yi and Tibetan and Hui and Naxi and others. At that time, they approached these groups as a Communist Party would: they tried to make common cause with the so-called “masses” of non-Han groups, the “exploited masses,” and what they found out is that this wasn’t effective. And then for the most part, with a couple of exceptions, these groups in what’s now Western China wanted no part of this army marching through their territories. And in many cases, there was violent clashes with them.

(Nadège Rolland)

After the Long March ended in 1935 the CCP established its base in Yan’an in Northern China, and started to develop a more coherent approach to ethnic minority affairs. The Nationalities Research Institute was created in 1941. Major studies at that time were also conducted on Mongols and Hui Muslims. At the same time as the Party identified Han chauvinism as contrary to its goal of unifying China’s diverse ethnic groups under Communist rule, it was also determined to transform the borderlands societies through socialist revolution to make them move away from their so-called “feudal backwardness.”

(Benno Weiner)

Again, on one hand, it’s a progressive approach, say “It’s our fault.” On the other hand, it’s fundamentally a discriminatory one, in which the central ideologies, the central beliefs of Hui Muslims and Mongols, as well as their economies and then their social structures, are determined to be backward and in need of changing. And to be progressive, they’re going to have to become more like the Han majority. So, in that sense, even though Han discrimination was targeted as being the cause of disunity, the entire project was embedded in Han chauvinism on some levels.

(Nadège Rolland)

During that same period, the Party decided not to make any further mention of self-determination or independence from the Chinese state for the borderland regions. Instead, it put forward the idea of a system of relative autonomy under the central authority of the state, inspired by the Soviet model.

(Benno Weiner)

Eventually they come to the formula where we’re going to promise, not self-determination – they’re not going to allow for secession of these groups – but they are going to promise them political autonomy, cultural and religious freedoms, ethnic equality, legally, and economic prosperity. And that’s how we’re going to get rid of Han Chauvinism and convince these people that they voluntarily, naturally, want to be part of this great national and socialist project. Essentially, at some point in the late 1930s, the Party jettisons this idea of self-determination or secession for non-Han peoples for an idea of a historically unified multi-minzu, multi-nationality nation.

Once this determination was made that the geo-body of the PRC or of the Chinese state would be the boundaries of the Qing Empire—although they would never use that terminology, of course – they took away the right for non-Han people to have their own political aspirations. They circumscribed what they could be. And essentially, they turned borderland people, or they turned former imperial subjects of the Qing empire into minorities, into minority nationalities.

(Nadège Rolland)

Without leaving their homeland, Tibetans, Uyghurs, and Mongols, became minorities. The process explicitly took away from them the right to determine their own future.

(Benno Weiner)

But it’s not really until 1949, it’s not really until the victory, that they get a chance to implement the majority of these policies in a systematic way. They take over the Northwest, for instance—the area that I study the most—Gansu, Qinghai, these areas, and sure enough, they find that many non-Han groups are very, very hesitant, let’s say, to welcome this new Han force into their areas. There’s actually rebellions. There’s fighting well past 1949 in northwest China and parts of southwest China as well that’s not widely known about. At least until 1953 in Qinghai and Gansu, for instance, you have armed resistance to the Communists.

At the same time, you have a very intent implementation of what they call the United Front policies. So, they go into places like Southern Gansu, which is Muslim and Tibetan, or in Qinghai, which is a mixture of different groups (Mongols, Tibetans, Muslims, and others), and say, we are not going to change your social systems, we are not going to topple your leaders, even, in many cases, local leaders who took up arms against us, that’s going to be water under the bridge. And we’re going to make these local elites the leaders of these new autonomous counties and prefectures.

The purpose of all this was to, in the words of the director of the United Front in Qinghai province, was to gradually and voluntarily and organically convince the non-Han masses that they should be part of China. We’re going to show you the benefits of socialism and of what they call patriotic education, of being part of this greater national unit, and then they’re going to choose slowly to push aside their traditional leaders, whether they’re secular or religious, and fully integrate into the PRC. And so, this was supposed to take years. In the end, the Party doesn’t have the patience to wait it out.

(Nadège Rolland)

Starting in Spring 1956, the CCP encouraged citizens to criticize the government’s policies openly, a move called the Hundred Flowers Campaign, which resulted in a country-wide tidal wave of discontent. When Mao Zedong realized this was getting out of hand, he launched the so-called Anti-rightist campaign in Spring 1957, which resulted in the political persecution of between one and three million people.

(Benno Weiner)

In non-Han areas, you have the same thing happening during the Hundred Flowers, where leaders, whether they’re Han or local, would say things like, well, you’re not actually implementing the things that you promised: there’s not really religious freedom, there’s this, there’s that. That, in 1957, when the Anti-rightist campaign happens, turns into an anti-local nationalism campaign. And suddenly, Han chauvinism is no longer the problem. Local nationalism is not caused by Han chauvinism, it’s an independent, treasonous political tendency that needs to be stamped out.

And so, the leader of the Northwest Bureau, for instance, of the Communist Party—I think at this point he was actually the head of the Nationalities Affairs Committee—says, there are Muslims who want to make an independent Muslim nation, there are Uyghurs who want to make (they’re talking about Hui) there are Uyghurs who want to make their own state, the Tibetans want to unify and to make their own state, in Inner Mongolia, Mongols want to unify with Outer Mongolia. The state is in danger of being torn apart, and we need to, we need to crush that.

And so, this really represents the beginning of the end of the United Front. And many of those leaders are purged or imprisoned. Already in 1956, in parts of Eastern Tibet, you have rebellion that spreads to Qinghai and Gansu in 1958; it spreads to Lhasa and Central Tibet in 1959. And so, you really have this moment where the promises made by the Party and the aspirations it had fall apart. And you have similar but different things happening in Xinjiang, for instance.

(Nadège Rolland)

At this point of China’s history, non-Han people began to be accused of being anti-socialists, anti-China, and possibly, separatists. Tremendous violence followed.

(Benno Weiner)

It’s absolutely, it’s overwhelming force. Again, and in Tibetan areas in particular, but also in many Muslim areas and to various degrees in Xinjiang and elsewhere. The full integration of Tibetan areas is done through overwhelming and indiscriminate violence in many cases. They’re also going to promote members of the masses to new leadership positions, and there’s certainly members of non-Han groups who benefit from this, and maybe even agree with it or encourage the destruction of the old society. The whole explanation for minzu tuanjie 民族团结，for minzu unity, had been based on this idea of Han discrimination: that narrative is severed. And it’s never really replaced with a convincing narrative that explains to many non-Han people, not all of them, of course, but many, why they should be part of China, you know. These areas became part of the PRC through violence.

(Nadège Rolland)

By the early 1960s, with the devastation of the Great Leap Forward becoming apparent, China experienced a fleeting moment of loosening and relaxation before the Cultural Revolution threw the country into more violence. During the long decade of revolutionary upheaval spanning from 1966 to Mao Zedong’s death in 1976, the Party determined that any expression of non-Han culture, language, history, or religion was backwards and reactionary, and therefore non-Han people needed to be put through an intensive process of ideological reeducation.

Professor Robert Barnett, a prominent historian of modern Tibet who now teaches at King’s College and the University of London, sums up the two main approaches followed by the CCP throughout the Maoist period.

(Robert Barnett)

Communist history, in China anyway, has been a struggle between the gradualist line – that early 1950s group that said, you’ve got to win these people over through charm and benefiting them and alliances with the upper class and tolerating religion—and the rapid action line, the leftist or ultra-leftist who said, no, no, you’ve got to destroy the upper classes, destroy religion, destroy the religious leaders and impose the dictatorship of the proletariat as quickly as possible. And this conflict completely dominated policy from 1950s, 60s and 70s and basically still does. That’s still the issue today. And it was the issue in the late Qing and certainly the same kind of question expressed in different terms. Do we assimilate Tibetans, force them all to learn Chinese? That’s what the Qing governor of Sichuan did in 1910, 1911, before he was overthrown. Or do we respect them and allow them to have autonomy? Same question, basically.

(Nadège Rolland)

Mao’s death and the arrival to power of Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s, signaled the Party’s adoption of a new approach towards the borderlands. Instead of revolutionary struggle and indoctrination, the CCP decided that market forces and economic development would now be the best way to transform these regions and their people. The theory was that as they became more developed, the borderlands would finally become fully integrated into the Chinese nation-state. This process would require patience, but eventually the distinctive characteristics of the various ethnic groups would disappear in favor of national unity and non-Han communities would eventually develop a sense of national belonging.

But there too, government policies did not achieve their aim, partly because the ethnic minorities living in the borderlands did not benefit economically, as Benno Weiner describes:

(Benno Weiner)

The determination is that we are going to integrate these areas, not through some sort of benevolent paternalism, but through economic development. So in some level, in some ways, it’s very similar to how they understand their legitimacy in China proper: if we can make these areas richer, then they will be more likely to be Chinese, be fully integrated into the Chinese nation state. And to some degree that’s occurred. There certainly has been economic development in more or less all non-Han areas, compared, particularly comparative to where they had been in previous periods. But the complaint among many—whether it’s in Xinjiang or Tibet or elsewhere—is a lot of this economic development is determined by others, and primarily benefits others. In other words, the Han majority, and the decision makers, and the people that control capital elsewhere. So one scholar referred to this as “disempowered development” (Andrew Fisher is his name) where you have development, it has benefited many people materially, but at the same time, it’s further disempowered them in their own communities.

(Nadège Rolland)

But by the end of the 1980s, the government’s mood had already started to shift. Riots in Lhasa in 1987, the students’ nation-wide uprisings of 1989, and the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 accelerated the Party’s hardening line towards the borderlands. Professor James Leibold, a leading scholar of the politics of race and ethnicity in modern China, based in Australia’s La Trobe University, explains:

(James Leibold)

The party has always adopted a kind of carrot and stick approach to governing its borderlands. And there used to be a lot more carrots. Because the belief with carrots was, if you kind of allow people to maintain their own language, religion, and cultural norms, again, that belief in you know, the inevitability of evolutionary progress, that would lead to homogeneity over time: that was the approach that was kind of institutionalized in the fifties and the 1980s.

But I think there has been that growing impatience. I really think it starts in 1988 when you have a rebellion in Lhasa and other parts of the Tibetan plateau, and you have the imposition of martial law. And then you can just go forward from there, on to a kind of a paranoia that begins to creep in to the mind of party leaders. You see it in 1989 when the students rise up and results in a moment of near-death experience for the Party. Then you see the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and fears that, you know, China is going to follow in its footsteps if it doesn’t adopt another approach. Then you have unrest again in Lhasa and in Urumqi in 2008-2009. And so this is all leading up to Xi Jinping being anointed in 2012. And so I think there was a real, he was pretty clear-eyed from the beginning, that he didn’t want China to go down the path of the Soviet Union. I think he used this phrase in his speech that, no one in the Soviet Union was man enough to stand up for the Party’s longevity, and, you know, Xi was going to be that kind of strong man, and that meant that he was going to rely on more sticks than carrots. We definitely see this kind of impatience that I think is driven by anxiety on the behalf of the Party, you know a fear that there are enemies, both external enemies, but also internal enemies. It’s a real deep sense of paranoia and it’s driving this more interventionalist policy.

(Nadège Rolland)

Under Xi Jinping, the CCP has been casting its interventionist policy in nation-building terms. Professor Leibold describes this as a back-to-the future moment, similar to earlier periods when the party-state aimed at the total transformation of these regions and peoples.

(James Leibold)

You see a kind of back to the future, a return to Mao, a belief in the importance of ideology, the importance of an interventionist state, that you needed to literally forge a collective identity. And so, you see impatience and a desire, not to abandon economic reforms, but to prioritize socio-cultural transformation, to prioritize ideology, the regime’s security, and that was always going to trump economic development.

I think nation building is an unfinished project. I know a lot of scholars, when they look at this concept of minzu gongzuo 民族工作, they’ll talk about it as it’s kind of ethnic policy or nationality policy. I prefer to translate it as “nation building work” because essentially that’s how Beijing sees it. And certainly under Xi Jinping, there was a perception that there was a problem with China’s approach to nation building, that not only was it not successful in the sense of leading to the transformation of non-Han people, but it was also leading to unrest, instability, violence, threats to border security. And so, what was required was a really new approach, referred to by some scholars as a “second generation” of nation building policies. And when Xi came to power, he really embraced that—quite quickly, actually.

You know, it’s difficult to parse Party speak and I think with hindsight, we can see that it was near the top of his agenda. And so, within a year of coming to power, he essentially lays out a new set of nation building policies that really focused on an active process of social-cultural transformation. So literally to reshape the physical geography of the borderlands, but also its people. To recast them in Han norms, thinking and expectations.

(Nadège Rolland) There are several important formulations that Xi Jinping uses when he addresses questions related to borderlands. One of them evokes the complex relationship between very diverse ethnic groups and the imperative of national unity.

(James Leibold)

So, it’s this phrase that was coined by Fei Xiaotong, who’s probably China’s most celebrated sociologist of duoyuanyiti 多元一体. It’s very hard to translate, and I spent a lot of time thinking about how you translate it. Duoyuan 多元 sometimes it’s called diversity and yiti 一体is unity. But if you look at it more carefully, and in fact, you go back and you read Fei Xiaotong’s work, really what it means is “from diversity towards unity.”

Fei—he was really a product of 20th century intellectual trends, which were really shaped by evolutionary thinking, and his belief was that there was a trajectory here, that we could chart across Chinese history of going from diversity, a set of different cultural communities that over time would merge towards unity. And for him, the kind of key driver was the Han ethnic core. So he referred to the Han as like a “snowball”—it’s an amazing metaphor—that would roll across this land, as he called it, which is China, and literally absorb in these non-Han people and forming a kind of, you know, it wasn’t going to be a pure snowball, it’s going to have a little bit of dirt in it, but it was going to kind of gather pace and weight and consolidate into a uniform force.

Fei Xiaotong was very prominent during the Republic at the late Republican period, involved in a lot of the debates then, and went into important roles in the 1950s. He was then purged, like many intellectuals during the Anti-rightist and the Cultural Revolution, but he was rehabilitated by Deng Xiaoping, and he gave a speech in 1988 where he, where he laid out this concept of duoyuanyiti or from diversity to unity, and that became a very influential book and really did shape intellectual thinking.

But going back to that, that concept of duoyuanyiti, it’s inherently vague that scholars have used it to argue that really it’s about balancing diversity and unity. And so there are people who were arguing that actually what Fei had in mind was a form of kind of multiculturalism, Western-style multiculturalism. But then you had others such as Ma Rong, who was a student of Fei Xiaotong at Beida, who said, no, no, people are misreading Fei Xiaotong, really, Fei was talking about moving towards unity, and we needed to change those policies that were institutionalizing diversity, we needed to dampen the sense of a separate identity, but also actively forge a kind of consciousness of belonging to a single Zhonghua minzu 中华民族or Chinese nation.

(Nadège Rolland)

“Forging the collective consciousness of the Chinese nation”—that’s another key term that Xi Jinping has been using repeatedly.

(James Leibold) And Xi Jinping still uses duoyuanyiti. It’s still a key formulation. But if you parse Party speak really carefully, you can see that they had to be more explicit. And so you had people starting to write articles saying commonality comes first and diversity is only secondary, to sort of say, yiti is more important than duoyuan, you know, just to be quite explicit about it.

And, that key formulation about, the forging of—I like to call it a kind of collective consciousness of the Chinese nation—the key phrase there is zhulao 铸牢, which means forging. And forging is really an active process, it’s not, you don’t just let it happen over time. You actually go in and you transform people’s minds.

So another phrase that the Party’s been using—Xi uses it a lot—is this idea of soul casting. So it’s zhu 铸, it’s the same character, but it’s zhuhun 铸魂, which means literally “to cast the soul.” It gets to the how primordial this is. It’s about literally going in and rewiring the brains of people. And that happens kind of seamlessly through the education system, but you can see other times—and Xinjiang’s probably the best example of where they adopt a kind of remedial form of soul casting by detaining people, and locking them up in these re-education camps, and then putting them through a remedial course of ideological remolding. But ideally, you know, this happens from birth. And that’s why schooling, education is really the front line of Xi’s project to kind of to recast souls of the Chinese people. And I’d argue it’s not just about minorities, it’s about everybody, all citizens of the PRC, including people in Hong Kong and eventually people in Taiwan and the overseas Chinese.

(Nadège Rolland)

A united Chinese nation that has its borderlands fully under control is certainly not an empty political slogan for the CCP leadership which, in recent decades, has implemented a series of policies that have become increasingly interventionist, assimilationist, and coercive, forgetting the pluralistic approach that it initially came to power promising. To conclude our discussion today, I asked Benno Weiner if he believed the CCP’s ethnic policies could ever take a more benevolent turn. He answered referring to Ernest Renan’s observation that nations are often forged through violence and the brutal unification of diverse peoples, and that for them to come together, they needed to forget the original violence that brought the nation into being.

(Benno Weiner)

Violence has to be forgotten, right? And for many—and again, I study mostly Tibetans and Hui Muslims—for many of these groups, that violence has not been forgotten. You know, it’s in living memory: it’s is a genera- you know, two or three generations ago, and that violence was overwhelming. I want to emphasize that communities were destroyed. Thousands and thousands were killed. And you don’t just wipe that away by saying, you know what, we’re going to be more but benevolent now. So I think the first barrier you have is memory. And the second is narrative. There really isn’t an explanation that the state has offered to explain to Tibetans and Uyghurs and Hui and others why they should be Chinese, in the national sense, not the ethnic sense, other than economic development and because we say so.

One of the other real barriers is demographic. It’s the transformation of parts of Xinjiang, parts of Eastern Tibet, and Inner Mongolia for many years, the construction of new infrastructures that link places that were previously still pretty isolated, such as southern Xinjiang, to the national and global market economy, means that it’s going very difficult to go back to some moment in which these groups, even under the vicissitudes of the Communist state, had some sort of power within their own communities. I think that ship’s kind of sailed.

So, there can certainly be a loosening. I hope there will be politically a loosening and an attempt to implement more policies that are less coercive and less assimilationist. But I also think that just the passage of time and the changes that have been made demographically in terms of infrastructure have changed these communities for good.

Music Credits

Asia Insight theme music is by Laura Schwartz of Bellwether Bayou.